What Now

The sophomore album from the electronic pop duo offers a biting, withering take on pop music, full of crisp humor while still finding real moments of tenderness.

The Durham, N.C. electropop duo Sylvan Esso debuted in 2013 with a single called “Hey Mami”—a humid snapshot of catcallers that hooted right along with them. Amelia Meath’s hiccupping trill, as light and sugary as corner shop wine, flew over producer Nick Sanborn’s languid, slightly arrhythmic beats—a surprising product from members of the Appalachian roots trio Mountain Man (Meath) and the freak-folk jammers Megafaun (Sanborn). It took a few spins to suss out its satire and parody; when the track appeared on their self-titled debut the following year, it paired well with far sillier bouts of humor, down to a song that remixed the playground chant of “head, shoulders, knees, and toes” into a displaced screed about technology (“H.S.K.T.”)

On What Now, Sylvan Esso’s second album, their driest quip waits patiently in the wings. “Radio,” a scathing survey of pop music songwriting, flings such acid as “Don’t you look good sucking American dick?” over their most broadly palatable synth hook yet, the sort of sound Katy Perry strove for on her similarly dyspeptic “Chained to the Rhythm.” Meath and Sanborn aren’t any less Technicolor or any more subtle here in drawling their disdain for FM radio-friendly songs that must be “three-point-three-oh” minutes—so you can picture their smirks when a glance at iTunes reveals that this track also runs almost exactly at 3:30.

Crisp humor is a time-honored constant in folk storytelling—Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan knew their way around a bitchy barb. On What Now, much like on Sylvan Esso’s debut, folk exists only in the narrative sense; Meath studies everyday scenes through a loupe, pausing between the punchlines to relay stark, occasionally morbid scenes of intimacy. However, there’s a thick sepia filter now with bigger set pieces propping up a more wide-lens anxiety. While Sylvan Esso offered peppy dioramas of untended coffee mugs and postcoital bruises, its successor scrutinizes more familiar pop imagery with a self-aware twist. Meath coos about birds chirping in the trees, but their songs are as clanging and mechanical as car alarms (“Signal”); dancers whirl to mask their desperation, sweat drenching their sequins (“Kick Jump Twist”).

Sanborn’s production is so boisterous, he hardly relaxes inside his beats. They bounce along with eccentric found sounds and Moog tics, occasionally evoking the sense of an errant tab opened somewhere on a browser. At moments, it seems like a defense of their oft-maligned genre, a fun rebuke of the stereotype that pop music is shallow. Their acerbic pop is both a product of the FM-friendly formula and a wry subversion of it.

When Meath and Sanborn ease into a slower lane, they find a sweetness that isn’t entirely likable. There is a bitterness to their Southern bless-your-heart feel, swaddling sharp observations in mannered dance-pop. The most haunting track on the album, “Die Young,” hones in on a burgeoning affair: Meath sings with soft curiosity about how she’s finally prepared to yolk her life to another’s. The lyrics themselves are a bit too histrionic to induce sympathy—“I was gonna die young/Now I gotta wait for you, honey”—but there’s no trace of irony; she is fully sincere to the melodrama over new love atop a pleasingly tinny house-lite pulse from Sanborn. (Reportedly, Meath and Sanborn have done the research, falling for each other after recording the debut.) It’s a moment that almost seems to answer the album’s title: the path forward may be calmer yet ever-curious, with plenty of amusement still to be found within.